rockinbbar;
Good afternoon to you my cyber friend, I trust the Friday was a good end of the week for you.
While I know that folks like JGRaider has put up photos of Texas mulies, they've had such lovely wide antlers that I wasn't able to wrap my head around how wide the ears were.
That's the rationale behind my putting up the photo of the Okanagan mulie with the 26" ear spread and comparing it to GW's Texas buck. I'd personally have guessed that Texas mulies "should" have ears at least as big as ours - again because of the heat - but I'm not really seeing that in the photo of GW's mystery buck.
We're headed up shortly to see what we can see for California Bighorn rams as a good buddy was drawn for one of two almost unobtanium ram tags for the mountain behind our house. Season starts Sept 01st so he's hoping we can see some rams tonight and so am I of course.
All the best to you all this weekend.
Dwayne
Hello Dwayne, I loved the pic of you measuring the ear width of that muley buck. I think I've killed almost 50 muleys from here in W TX, Trans Pecos, TX Panhandle, and E NM. Biggest bodied bucks are here in West TX in the sandhills regions, and a big mature buck here will be right at 25". There are virtually no whitetails here except for the rare straggler. Hope that helps some.
I've hunted lots of areas in Texas where whitetails and mule deer coexist though. I'm told by biologists that the only way to know is like Mac said.....tissue samples, hair samples, etc. Another thing to look at is the size of the tarsal glands supposedly, but I don't know squat about that. I've seen a few that looked odd to me but can't personally say I've ever handled a dead one. I do know that antler configuration is a poor indicator generally. This is a buck we found dead in a plum thicket several years ago that was 100% verified as a 194" whitetail. In looking at only his antler cofig one would swear this was a big old muley buck.....
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/znslaIK.jpg)
